WebP Creator Schools a Critic on Flash's Demise
Description
A screenshot of a Twitter conversation. The first tweet, from user "@faiyaz_c_ya," expresses frustration, asking, "how did we kill adobe flash and not .webp". Below it is a reply from Jyrki Alakuijala (@jyzg), the creator of WebP. He holds an Emmy award in his profile picture and calmly states, "Perhaps because flash is complex and commercial and WebP is simple and open." The image captures a classic developer complaint being directly and authoritatively addressed by the source. The technical context is the transition from proprietary web technologies like Adobe Flash to open standards like WebP. The humor lies in the expert's concise and definitive response to a user's rant, a scenario deeply appreciated by developers who value technical merit and open-source principles over user frustration with new standards
Comments
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Complaining about WebP is a developer rite of passage, but getting publicly corrected by its creator is the final boss of that tutorial level
Flash needed its own VM to render a rectangle; WebP just needs Chrome’s marketing team to keep pretending it’s a JPEG upgrade - survival by lower orchestration overhead
We successfully coordinated a global effort to kill Flash because it was a security nightmare, but we can't agree on WebP because our biggest complaint is having to add another line to our nginx config
The beautiful irony: we collectively murdered Flash for being a bloated security nightmare, yet WebP - created by the same company - persists despite universal developer disdain. Turns out the secret to format immortality isn't being good or secure, it's being 'simple and open' enough that browsers can't justify the PR nightmare of removing it. Flash had plugins; WebP has plausible deniability
Web tech Darwinism: anything needing a plugin, updater, and quarterly CVE budget dies; anything that fits in Content-Type: image/webp and a GPU decode path lives forever
Flash was proprietary quicksand - easy to hate-kill. WebP's the open-source tar pit: inescapable because 'standards'
We killed Flash because it was a runtime with a CVE schedule - WebP survives because you can’t sunset a file extension in change control